The Women

Present, as at a Kaffeeklatsch in the good old days, were Frau Field Marshal Goering, Frau Deputy Fuehrer Hess, Frau Reichsminister Funk, Frau Governor General Frank, Frau Youth Leader von Schirach.* These wives and widows of Germany's war criminals awaited their own judgment day in a camp near Augsburg. Bavaria's Denazification Ministry was about to try them as "profiteers."

"You will make Nazis out of people who never were Nazis before," snarled Henrietta von Schirach, when the New York Herald Tribune's Marguerite Higgins visited the camp last week. "Please tell your General Clay I hope he will not treat me in such a fashion that my children will grow up to hate America." Luise Funk, a witch-eyed redhead, echoed this threat of future hatred: "The things happening now to the German people are a humiliation they will never forget." That plump valkyrie, former Actress Emmy Sonnemann Goering, had a specific grievance. Recently one of the camp's hungry rats had taken a bite out of her ankle. Said Frau Goering:

"If I were given the choice between the gas chamber and continuing to live indefinitely in this insect-ridden place, eating two bowls of soup a day and not even having plumbing, I would choose the gas chamber." Like a Teutonic Lysistrata, she offered a general recipe for ending war: "Women should inform the men that if war comes they will refuse to conceive any more children."

Her defense: "I am a political idiot. Hitler did not ask German women whether they wanted this war." Amid applause from the other women, she exclaimed: "If Hitler had won the war, I can assure you he would not have jailed Mrs. Roosevelt or Mrs. Truman."

* German women tack their husbands' titles on to their own names. A classic German joke tells of the woman who called herself Frau Hatchet-Murderer Mueller.

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